Billionaires getting richer

The 500 richest people on earth this year have gained 1 trillion extra dollars, according to a calculation by Bloomberg news agency. The growth, which is four times the size of last year, was mainly due to rising share prices.

The boss of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, saw his wealth increase most: with 34.2 billion dollars to almost 100 billion in total. Bezos took over in October as the richest man in the world from Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Gates, now the number two, … received around 9 billion dollars. His assets are estimated at more than 91 billion dollars.

The 500 richest people have $ 5.3 trillion according to Bloomberg. A year ago that was 4.4 trillion dollars.

Online retail giant Amazon commenced operations early December in Australia, opening a fulfilment centre in outer Melbourne. The move forms part of Amazon’s continuing global expansion, based on the accumulation of profit through the brutal exploitation of low-wage warehouse workers. The company’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, is now the world’s wealthiest individual, with a personal fortune estimated at more than $US100 billion: here.

6 thoughts on “Billionaires getting richer”

THE just-published Resolution Foundation report says that real wage growth will be flat in 2018 and that many households are already pessimistic about their finances.

It warned that the trend will worsen in the first few months of next year before ‘levelling out’. This will result in zero real wage growth in 2018, which ‘will be an improvement on 2017, but worse than any year in the three decades leading up to the financial crisis of 2007-8.’

Rebecca Long-Bailey MP, Labour’s Shadow Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Secretary, said, ‘The report succinctly encapsulates the hardship many across Britain are facing under the Tories and will continue to face in 2018.’

Commenting on the Resolution Foundation’s gloomy report into the prospects for the UK economy under the Tories, she said: ‘After seven years of Conservative economic mismanagement, the figures speak for themselves.

‘Real wages are still lower than they were in 2010 and Britain faces a productivity crisis. This is not a government willing or able to raise productivity and living standards for people in Britain.’

Torsten Bell, director of the research group, said 2017 has been ‘a tough year for living standards’.
He warned: ‘The bad news is we may only go from backwards to standing still, with prospects for a meaningful pay recovery still out of sight.’ The research group added that 27% of working age households expect their financial positions will worsen in the coming 12 months.

• Homelessness in England is a ‘national crisis,’ with more than 120,000 homeless children living in emergency accommodation, such as hostels, a UK parliamentary committee has warned. More than 9,000 people sleep on England’s streets, a figure that has doubled since 2011, and some 78,000 families are homeless, the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee said on Wednesday. The homeless children miss far more schooling than their peers, the committee said, criticising the British government’s response as ‘unacceptably complacent’.

‘There are thousands of children in temporary accommodation – a salutary reminder of the human cost of policy failure,’ Meg Hillier, Labour chair of the committee, said in a statement.